Dreamer drain?
“I’ve just realised, we’ve lost all our visionaries”.
Across our networks we’ve been hearing about a scarcity of the ability to dream. More precisely, the capabilities to imagine and believe in a radically better future, and communicate that vision persuasively. You know these capabilities when you encounter them, often by the effect they have on teams – people are energised and inspired as previously unimagined possibilities are uncovered. After years of working with leaders in corporates, INGOs, public sector and social enterprise, we’re hearing from our network that these capabilities are experiencing a downturn – and they are crucial leadership capabilities in our view.
To explore this possible trend, we interviewed a small group of Chief Learning Officers, Chief People Officers, Chief Execs, and individuals strongly associated with visionary capabilities across private and public sector organisations. Our hunch was this trend was playing out across large organisations that employ thousands, so we started there. Interviewees spoke from a range of sectors: defence, energy, consumer goods, construction, health, national and local government. We also read the literature, and we discovered how muddy thinking about vision can be.
For clarity, we’re not talking about the rational or collective process of constructing a vision to achieve a pre-determined organisational change. The combination of capabilities that we seem to be losing – but that potentially exists in us all – is creative imagination, unhindered by responsibility or attachment to the status quo; the vision to work on something problematic about the present; the ability to draw on a broad awareness of the problem conditions; and the capability to take initiative, clarifying and persuasively communicating the newly imagined alternative.
This dreamer combination thrives in healthy symbiosis with other capabilities within a team, and often in a visionary-integrator or dreamer-doer pairing. Just about every leadership framework and leadership team diagnostic we've come across holds a central role for vision and purpose, so what happens when these qualities are squeezed out?
Our interviewees described a tough macro-environment and culture for dreamer capabilities to flourish in listed companies and public sector organisations. The end of cheap money and the shocks of war have created real and perceived scarcity. Increasing instability, regular inversions of norms, upending of stable orders and a ‘might makes right’ geopolitics is driving something of an ‘amygdala hijack’ inside organisations. This leads to fear and uncertainty driving short-term anxiety-reducing reactions, which themselves create fresh problems, or leave us vulnerable to returning threats. Dreamers are increasingly out. They are starting their own organisations, working with longer-term oriented investors or risk capital; joining think tanks; or forming new networks where they find kinship and see their capabilities are valued.
It seems unlikely that dreamers will be rapidly rehired into new roles when conditions change – if current investment plans for adoption of AI and data-centred innovation systems are anything to go by. But given how important dreamer capabilities are to the vitality of teams and organisations, how do we create spaces for, appreciation of and access to these capabilities, even if they can’t survive inside large organisations right now?
Click through for our Long Read to learn what we think the implications could be for organisations.
